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The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

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Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#21

Post by photonbeam »

xref wrote: post #18
labster wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is lamenting the decline of ESPN which will make everything worse, and half the ads on the page are for Fubo. Such sweet irony. The thing is, I’m one of those people who never watched ESPN, yet paid for years for it in a cable package. Now I have some streaming packages I may not watch in a month, but at least I’m not paying $10/month for something I never watch. The era of monopoly subsidized sports is co…

> Perhaps athlete salaries will come back down to Earth as well Ehhh you lost me there with that anti-player talking point parroted by the billionaire owners of the league. The players are part of a union, and their CBA says they get 48.8% of league revenue, while the owners get 51.2%. But somehow people just latch onto “players salaries are too high” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_collective_bargaining_ag...

I think its meant that all revenue for the sports will go down, so also player salary bargaining positions

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#22

Post by kristjansson »

The sort of infuriating thing is that Time Warner Cable, now part of Charter, as recently as a few years ago applied broadly the same leverage to LA sports fans. They bought the local rights to the Dodgers and Lakers in 2013, and charged high enough fees on the networks carrying those games that TWC / Spectrum was the only carrier of consequence. So, if one wanted to watch the Dodgers (and to a less extent the Lakers), TWC / Spectrum was the basically the only option for TV. This situation prevailed until 2020 (!) or so.

And now they’re “indifferent” to the video business?

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#23

Post by secabeen »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #19
metaphor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 95% of the US only having access to wired broadband via coaxial cable is more than just an inconvenience to switching ISPs. This 95% figure is clearly disingenuous handwaving. Briefly looking at California >= 250/25 residential service for cable[1] and fiber[2] shows substantial overlap. ...and Florida cable[3] v. fiber[4]. ...and New York cable[5] v. fiber[6]. [1] https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?ve…

That broadband map is garbage, I frequently see regions where it says there is fiber, but in reality there is none. Maybe it is some other very high percentage and not 95%, but I have spent a lot of time searching for houses and looking up specific addresses on fiber ISP websites, and they pretty much only exist in 2 cases. One is if the housing development is ~2010 or newer, and they installed fiber in the undergrou…

Interesting; that map is pretty good for my area when you zoom all the way in.

I can see that it would be very hard to bring fiber to places with underground utilities that don't already have it.

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#24

Post by dahdum »

raminf wrote: post #17

With the dropoff of local networks and cable-cutters,the sports leagues are going to start direct-streaming the games themselves and capture advertiser and viewer revenue directly. MLB.tv is a primary example. They already have the technology and the brand reach. All they have to do is add color commentary (post-game shows, direct interviews with players and coaches) and the value of local TV sports networks and inte…

The math is still dire, without forced subsidies from non-viewers the pie is shrinking fast. You can cut ESPN out all you want, but there aren’t enough sports fans to make up the revenue gap.

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#25

Post by nonameiguess »

hedora wrote: post #11

I don’t understand the appeal of bundling for non-sports content. With video on demand, most people just binge watch stuff, and most streaming services have more than one thing a given subscriber would like to watch. So, if the price of the bundle is significantly greater than the price of one streaming service, why not just hop from one streaming service to another, one at a time? Even during peak cable, the number…

Mostly because this is a hell of a hassle to save $70 a month that becomes not worth it once you're older than 25, married with a kid or two, and you're spending that much money on food every 3 days anyway. If you're really that cost-conscious, you can only buy used cars and live in cheaper neighborhoods and save more money all at once than you'd save by cutting streaming subscriptions in 20 lifetimes. At some point, sanity and convenience become preferable to spending hours every weekend digging through the newspaper to cut coupons.

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#26

Post by phone8675309 »

raminf wrote: post #17

With the dropoff of local networks and cable-cutters,the sports leagues are going to start direct-streaming the games themselves and capture advertiser and viewer revenue directly. MLB.tv is a primary example. They already have the technology and the brand reach. All they have to do is add color commentary (post-game shows, direct interviews with players and coaches) and the value of local TV sports networks and inte…

> sports leagues are going to start direct-streaming the games themselves and capture advertiser and viewer revenue directly

The NFL has been doing this since NFL Sunday Ticket launched in 1994, along with NFL Network. The flip side of this is that they also do it without advertisements because it's a pay service (they show a "Game is in Commercial" message instead of the advertisements that would be shown in their place).

There's no need to appeal to advertisers when your fan base is so fanatical about the content that they'll pay hundreds of dollars a season to watch the games they want to watch.

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#27

Post by metaphor »

secabeen wrote: post #23
lotsofpulp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That broadband map is garbage, I frequently see regions where it says there is fiber, but in reality there is none. Maybe it is some other very high percentage and not 95%, but I have spent a lot of time searching for houses and looking up specific addresses on fiber ISP websites, and they pretty much only exist in 2 cases. One is if the housing development is ~2010 or newer, and they installed fiber in the undergrou…

Interesting; that map is pretty good for my area when you zoom all the way in. I can see that it would be very hard to bring fiber to places with underground utilities that don't already have it.

Indeed, I've found it to be quite accurate in my city when zoomed in enough to where the hex grid transitions to green/red dots on individual properties.

In my neighborhood and adjacent communities within a roughly 5-mile radius, utilities are all underground, but the pattern that emerges in these parts when attempting to predict whether a community will have fiber to the home or not appears to be some combination of existing easements/city right-of-way, relative community affluence, and housing density.

For example, AT&T brought fiber to my neighborhood likely because they could easily bury it along the city's right-of-way where not even HOA radicals can stop them. The more affordable townhome community to the immediate west didn't get the same infra though, despite there being comparable townhome communities less than a mile away surrounding a regional park that did. Similarly, the expensive homes within a gated golf country club to the immediate north of us doesn't get fiber despite the affluence living in that community, but the deed restricted community outside the gates to the immediate west which shares the same name did, while the mixed single- and multi-family community to the south of that community didn't. The homes in this area are anywhere between mid-80s to late-90s construction.

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#28

Post by phone8675309 »

nonameiguess wrote: post #25
hedora wrote: post #11

I don’t understand the appeal of bundling for non-sports content. With video on demand, most people just binge watch stuff, and most streaming services have more than one thing a given subscriber would like to watch. So, if the price of the bundle is significantly greater than the price of one streaming service, why not just hop from one streaming service to another, one at a time? Even during peak cable, the number…

Mostly because this is a hell of a hassle to save $70 a month that becomes not worth it once you're older than 25, married with a kid or two, and you're spending that much money on food every 3 days anyway. If you're really that cost-conscious, you can only buy used cars and live in cheaper neighborhoods and save more money all at once than you'd save by cutting streaming subscriptions in 20 lifetimes. At some point,…

The Midwesterner in me really wants to argue that cutting coupons still makes sense, but I can understand if you've got a lot going on that might not be the case.

Re: The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

#29

Post by phone8675309 »

labster wrote: post #10
0x445442 wrote: post #4

Here’s another perspective https://www.outkick.com/espn-charter-cable-bundle-sports/

The author is lamenting the decline of ESPN which will make everything worse, and half the ads on the page are for Fubo. Such sweet irony. The thing is, I’m one of those people who never watched ESPN, yet paid for years for it in a cable package. Now I have some streaming packages I may not watch in a month, but at least I’m not paying $10/month for something I never watch. The era of monopoly subsidized sports is co…

> Perhaps athlete salaries will come back down to Earth as well.

Athlete salaries were historically artificially low in the NFL and MLB because free agency did not exist until the mid seventies or early eighties. Top-tier athlete salaries in those two leagues will not decline so long as free agency is still in place.

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